Publishing a Product

APIs become accessible when a Product is published and made visible on the Developer Portal for use by application developers. A Product can be published to selected communities of application developer organizations, and the Plans within the Product can be used to tailor access and visibility further.

Before you begin

You must stage a Product before it can be published. For more information about staging Products, see Staging a Product.
Note: If you want to publish a LoopBack project, you must publish both the APIs (by publishing the Products that contain the APIs) and the associated applications so the project can be run. For more information about publishing LoopBack applications, see Publishing a LoopBack application through the API Designer.

To complete the Product management tasks that are described in this topic, you must either be the owner of the API provider organization, or be assigned Manage permission for Products in the Catalog that contains the Product. If you have View permission for Products, you have read-only access to the Product management page. For information on configuring Product management permissions for a Catalog, see Creating and configuring Catalogs.

The syndication feature in IBM® API Connect means that Products can be contained within a Space in a Catalog. In this case, to complete the Product management tasks that are described in this topic, you must either be the owner of the API provider organization, or be assigned Manage permission for Products in the Space that contains the Product. For information on configuring Product management permissions for a Space, see Managing user access in a Space.

About this task

A community is a collection of developer organizations, used to control which organizations have access to Products and Plans without having to assign access on an individual basis. A Product can be published to selected communities, which means that only application developers within those organizations contained within the community can see the Product on the Developer Portal and obtain application keys to access it. A Product can alternatively be published to all communities. Communities are used to restrict the visibility and accessibility of APIs, for example to particular business partners, internal organizations, or other groups of application developers.

Procedure

You can publish a product in any of the following ways:

  • Publish a new Product.
  • Replace a Product with another Product.
  • Supersede a Product with another Product

    For details of the ways in which you can publish a Product, see the following subtopics: